


Just Like a B-Movie

by Severina



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Community: smallfandomfest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-28 06:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7627819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severina/pseuds/Severina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You ever think that maybe you fell asleep and woke up in an alternate universe imagined by some fuckwad at DC Comics?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Like a B-Movie

**Author's Note:**

> This is by far the weirdest thing I have ever written. And that's sayin' something. Written for prompt "library" at LJ's smallfandomfest.
> 
> * * *

The man getting out of the Town Car is wearing a crisp pin-striped shirt and a tie.

That’s odd – at this time of day, in _this_ neighbourhood – but his headshrinker keeps reminding him that not every stranger is a bazooka-wielding, kung-fu-fighting, ninja assassin warrior out to kill him and finish what Gabriel started. Some people are just average joe's going about their daily routine, like… well, Matt's not entirely sure what a 'daily routine' looks like for an average joe. Picking up milk, maybe, or going to the gym. For Matt it means spending a minimum of one hour per day five days a week in the great outdoors – in this case, the corner one block away from his new place – because the headshrinker also tells him that he can't stay holed up inside his apartment forever. Which is complete bullshit – what does Crain think delivery is _for_ , anyway? – but he's kinda tired of jumping at shadows and checking the locks seventeen times a day, so.

Crain also tells him that he's supposed to 'engage with strangers' whenever he feels comfortable. So Matt fixes a smile on his face and gives this stranger in his neat office-shirt-and-tie the universal 'hey' head-bob. He even throws in a "nice day" for the hell of it and raises his Pepsi in a gesture of what he hopes looks like goodwill.

The stranger pauses with the driver's door half-open, then plants on a tentative smile of his own and bobs his head back before heading into the bodega. 

Matt rocks back on his heels, feeling accomplished. The sun is shining, the birds are… probably singing, somewhere that's not a surprisingly warm spring day in concrete encased Harlem. He's considering rewarding himself with a slice of pizza when the stranger exits the store, a folded newspaper in his hand. That's another thing average joe's do – pick up the newspaper. Matt takes another sip of his cola and half-watches as the man opens the rear door of his car, bending at the waist to remove something from the seat. Something large and black. Something deadly.

"Hey," he manages to get out.

The man opens fire with the – machine gun? AK-47? – and the first round of bullets hit a young girl passing almost directly in front of him. He watches shocked and numb and rooted to the spot as blood blossoms on the stomach of her seersucker pants and her hand clutches at her side. He can't seem to move, not even when she turns gasping to him and blood gushes from her mouth. Not even when the stranger swings the gun in his direction.

"You were nice to me," the stranger says, "so I'm going to give you a chance."

Matt stumbles backward and down when the bullet pierces his thigh. One moment he is standing, gaping at the stranger with blood now spattered on his expensive shirt, and the next he is sprawled on the ground. The Pepsi explodes next to his head and the gun rattles and people are falling and screaming and Matt flails frantically at the fine spray of sticky moisture on his face until he realizes he's temporarily blinded not by blood and grey matter but by caffeinated beverage.

The gun barks again and Matt watches sparks light up the parked cars across the street, watches windows shatter, watches the old man that always sits on the park bench smoking cigarillos jitter in place and then slump backward. The stranger continues to fire and Matt blinks past the pain in his leg, past the shock, to fumble one-handedly at the pocket of his jeans. Wonders if he can get a text off to McClane before the stranger remembers him.

He hasn't even managed to slide the phone from his pocket when the man's shoes appear in his limited field of vision. Fine dress shoes, brown leather with a tassel. Probably Italian, and he would rather think about that then the fact that he's going to die any second but he makes himself look up to meet the man's eyes. At least he can do that much, and curse Dr. Crain while he's at it. He never should have left the fucking apartment. 

He looks up to face the man who's going to kill him – except now it's not really a man. Now there is a fine black caul covering the stranger's features, and the arms that hold the gun have thinned to stalks and bristle with thick standing black hairs, and the mouth that opens spouts long spiked mandibles that gnash against his chin.

"I'm going to give you a chance," the thing that was once a man says again. His speech is guttural, garbled. His eyes are pale and waterless blue, the only human thing still remaining in a face that shifts and contorts with oily black slickness. "Run," he says.

Matt pushes back, the palms of his hands sliding in spilled soda and warm, tacky wetness that makes him wonder how he could ever have thought the earlier spray on his face was blood. He staggers to his feet when the man turns away, the gun lifting again in an arc. Watches the grey gabardine of the man's fancy dress pants shred as the thin, twig-like legs push through the fabric; the upmarket Italian shoes stretch and rip apart as the man's feet warp into flat, brittle talons.

He wonders if maybe he never really got over the whole firesale thing after all. He'd read somewhere that geniuses have a more difficult time getting over trauma than average joe's, so maybe getting chased and kidnapped and shot was more than his overtaxed brain could handle. Maybe he's strapped down to a table somewhere muttering to himself and drooling.

Then the gun stutters in rapid fire again, and Matt runs.

 

Three nights later, he finds himself outside a row of brownstones. 

The street is quiet. He still huddles behind a parked car for five minutes, scoping it out. Nothing moves, but his thigh pulses in time with his heartbeat, and he knows it's well past time that he disinfects the sight again, changes the bandages, checks for infection. The exit wound itches and he has no idea if that's a good sign or a bad one. He spent too much time yesterday huddled in the basement of some overpriced Chinese restaurant, watching through barred windows as the not-men prowled and their heavy artillery toppled buildings and, once, as a line of cops in full tactical armour were cut down as they advanced down the street. 

McClane's phone is still unresponsive. Circuits are down everywhere. He's on his own.

It takes more effort than it should to force himself up and away from the dubious shelter of the Continental. His sneakers are silent on the concrete steps. He skirts the broken boards of the front door laying shattered in a heap, careful not to disturb a thing. He leaves the door as it was behind him, gaping to the street – nothing to see here, crazy bug-men, move along. 

Two days ago the sight of the women in the pools of stagnant blood would have turned his stomach, made him gag and have to force down the bile. But he's seen too much death since everyone's Tuesday morning turned sour to do more than tiptoe cautiously around the bodies and then make his way slowly through the house, past heavy oak furniture littered with bullet holes and the remnants of crystal decanters that crunch under his heels. He fills his knapsack with a few cans from the pantry and bottled water from the still cold fridge, checks out every room before he heads to the third floor and the master bedroom and finally sets up in the shadows with his back against the California King.

His leg, first. No fresh blood, no pus, no discoloration. He redresses the wound with the bandages he'd snagged from the Shop-Rite and then fills his stomach. Canned crab and snow peas and a bottle of the water and he doesn’t really taste any of it but he has to eat because it'd be far too easy to just curl up under the duvet and turn off his brain and honestly, _fuck that_. His brain is his biggest asset. (Also his hair, but he hasn't showered since Monday and bug-men are probably not swayed by judicious use of Pantene's best products, so his brain it is.)

He wipes his fingers on his shirt and then sets up his gear. A sweep of the emergency channels gives him nothing but the same recorded messages. Google is still up and running, with the biggest hit counts going to 'survival' and 'self-defense'. Most of the message boards he uses are down, but he does find a few open threads on usenet. Nothing helpful – the usual end of the world doomsayers who may actually be right this time, a couple of links to supposed safe houses in the Detroit area, someone who claims to have seen the bug-men storm the White House. Even as someone who knows how easily that shit can be faked, Matt's kind of inclined to believe that last one.

He lets himself have another half a bottle of water before he pulls up the tracking program. 

The red blip that represents John McClane's cell phone pulses steadily, moving at an even clip. The first night had found him mostly around 1PP, the second moving slowly and steadily through the campus. Searching for Lucy. Matt's brow creases as he watches the pulsing dot move across the screen. He still isn't sure exactly how he's able to track McClane – oh, getting his data was easy enough, but if the GPS tracking is working then McClane's phone must be _on_ , and if it's on… Matt shakes his head, pulls up McClane's number and dials it without looking away from the monitor. Still nothing. 

It makes no sense.

He makes a few adjustments to overlay the mapping system and then leans forward, shoulders tense. Lets out a breath. 

John McClane is currently at the corner of 119th and 2nd. About thirty feet from his run-down walk-up above the barber shop. About fifty feet from where he encountered Mr. Fancy Shirt and Tie before he morphed into the first of the bug-men.

McClane is looking for him.

He is halfway to his feet before his gaze finds the window, darkness pressing down from the silent sky. He reluctantly forces himself back to a sitting position. In the dark the bug-men are little more than shadows among shadows, impossible to discern until they're almost on top of you. Going outside now would be suicide. And he wants to live. He suddenly wants to live very, very badly.

Tomorrow, then. It'll be dangerous, keeping the gear out and his attention split between the screen and the things prowling the streets. But he's got to try. He's been waiting for McClane to settle so that he can get a fix and then go to him, and that's probably not going to happen. The dude always did like action.

He makes sure the light from the screen isn't visible from the street, then falls asleep watching that steady red blip.

When he wakes up in the morning the program has crashed. And though he works on it for two hours straight, twisting his increasingly oily hair into elaborate spikes in frustration, he can't get it back online. 

His link to McClane is lost.

* * *

Matt jerks awake when the palm covers his mouth.

For a moment he struggles against the press of the hand, jerks against the hard floor. Then it comes back to him: his flight across the city, dodging patrols and small weapons fire; his close call on the FDR; finding refuge at the library. The marble floor is cold against his back where his shirts have ridden up in his restless sleep. The sharp edge of one of the books digs into the meat of his thigh, aggravating the still healing wound.

And there are two of _them_ , chittering outside the window.

Matt blinks to let Tabby know he's awake, then eases to his feet and up to the window when she nods and takes her hand away. His weapon is less than a foot away, still unfired since he found it stowed behind the counter of the Shop-N-Save. Matt slowly slides the safety off, holds the gun pressed to his side with the barrel pointed at the ceiling the way he saw McClane do it. Back then it was a couple of bad guys with guns coming up a stairwell; fast forward and it's giant bug-men with bristling black claws and long, thick slug bodies that drag behind them, scraping on the pavement. That tote automatic weapons and carry grenade launchers on their custom belts. Things out of a nightmare that walk and utter high-pitched squeaks of a language that could make your ears bleed and really honestly _should_ have driven most of them crazy by now. But somehow none of them have gone screaming down the street. 

It's almost become… ordinary. 

The human brain is a pretty amazing thing.

When the twitters begin to fade, Keisha lifts her hand then drops it slowly. Matt lets out a silent breath. He thumbs the safety back on quickly, then climbs carefully down from his crouch at the window. He leans against the railing, looks around at his group scattered throughout the reading room. _His_ group, because somehow – even though he was the third person to arrive – the little cadre of survivors looks to him for the answers. Every day he literally prays that he doesn't get them killed. Being the leader is for suckers.

"They've moved off past the rubble," Keisha finally says. She hops lithely down from the ledge and joins him at the railing. "That's the only two we've seen since… when? Last Friday?" 

"Not counting the small group we saw when we raided the Quik-E," Marnie says with a nod. "There's less of them every day."

"You don't know that," Charlie argues. 

"Maybe the mothership is calling them home," Chloe says.

"Or for fuck's sake," Charlie says, "not the damn mothership again."

Matt takes the stairs down to the lower level two at a time, drowns out the renewed discussion. Aliens, genetic modification gone awry, mutants, the results of nuclear proliferation – over the course of almost three weeks at the library, he's heard every crackbrained theory three times over. Hell, he shared his own 'we've slipped into an alternate universe' hypothesis back in the early days when they had locked themselves in the Rare Books room and hordes of bug-men still roamed the streets, cutting down everything that moved, launching RPGs at any structure over three stories, leaving the front of the massive library a crumbled detritus of broken columns and shattered walls. To anyone looking at it from the outside, it looked impassible. Which is entirely what makes it so safe. That's why he chose to stay when everyone else wanted to cut and run. That's why he convinced them to stick it out. That's how he became the leader, damnit.

That, and the collections. Everything they need to know is right here at their fingertips. They just have to compile it the old-fashioned way. 

He'd honestly give his right thumb for a working computer and a flash drive, though.

"It's been twenty eight days," he hears Marnie say as he settles into his seat and tugs one of the open books closer. This one is on fruit preservation. He picks up on of the pens and twirls it for a moment before hunching over the book. Just _his_ daily routine now. 

"I'm telling you," the woman continues, "give it twelve more. Then we're home free."

He personally thinks Marnie is closest to being right. Not that he's entirely sure that he believes in God, but the match to the ten plagues of Egypt is eerily accurate. The bug-men are their modern day plague of locusts, and the airborne things that they saw briefly dropping bombs on the Sistine Chapel – before the sat-comm feed crapped out – sure as fuck looked like flies to him, at least if they were filtered through the same Hieronymus Bosch lens that provided the bug-men. He has a feeling that if they were able to find feeds for Asia or Latin America or Africa, they'd find mutant frog-men somewhere; a plague of lice-like creatures somewhere else. 

Forty days for the plagues, if the Bible stories are correct. Less than two weeks to go. But even if Marnie's wrong and the bug-men don't bug out – hah, he _slays_ himself – they've got to book it either way. Summer is just around the corner, and New York City is gonna get _ripe_. 

Matt rubs the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes, spikes his fingers through his tangled hair. Twelve days to plan for _everything_. He really wishes he had a spreadsheet.

"We still need someone on the solar panels," he calls out before they can get bogged down in another genetics versus aliens debate. "And there's a whole section on growing wheat that still needs to be cross-referenced to—"

The shuffle of a footstep in the corridor outside the room silences Charlie's bitching about alien invasion quicker than Matt's announcements of work assignments ever could. He sees Tabby freeze, but Keisha and Marnie have their weapons out and are sidling toward either side of the closed door before he even has to wave them into place. Matt pulls his own gun again for the second time in fifteen minutes. He makes his way across the room and crouches behind the table closest to the door; props his gun-arm along the polished wood. 

Two minutes. Three. At four he thinks that maybe the sound was just the scurrying of an animal that somehow escaped the carnage, and at five he's about to call for them all to stand down. 

That's when the door handle starts to slowly turn to the left. 

He hears Tabby stifle a scream on an indrawn breath, barely noticeable if not for the silence of the room. A quick glance shows her pallid face and pinched lips, but the baseball bat is in her hands and she looks as determined as she does terrified. They're a good group. His group. 

He really most sincerely hopes they don't die here. 

The door swings open on well-oiled hinges, and the bug-thing stands silhouetted in a halo of shimmering dust motes. It swivels its oversized head, turning obsidian eyes this way and that. The rifle looks obscene in its grasp. No A-list summer blockbuster shit for them, these guys are like something out of a bad B-movie. Matt has had more than enough time in the last few weeks to study up on locust behaviour, and he knows that the creature won't take a step until it's visually verified that it's safe to do so. He nods carefully toward the women, hopes the instruction is clear in his eyes. _Wait for it._

Marnie tightens her grip on her bat. 

Then a slender, clawed foot eases forward, and it's Charlie who panics. He rushes in from the left, his crowbar drawn back and over his head. The rifle swings in a polished loop in his direction and in the next three seconds Matt visualizes the tat-tat-tat of the weapon as it discharges, sees Charlie stutter and dance in the hail of the bullets, hears the patter of blood as it drenches the hardwood floor. His sightline is blocked, but from the corner of his eye he sees Anne-Marie raising her gun and knows that she has to do it if she's going to save Charlie's life; knows also that the pop of her weapon will likely draw more of the bug-men to their location. Knows that after this, it'll be run or die.

He watches in seeming slow-motion as one insectoid finger tightens on the trigger…

…and then someone flies in from behind the creature, tackles the thing around the waist and bears it down. There's a chittering, squealing squall as the bug-man lands in a sprawl that severs one skinny limb, and then the man atop him is raising the claw hammer in his hand and bringing it down on the back of the thing's head. The screeching dies abruptly and the man pushes away, the front of his shirt grimed with locust-juice. 

"Jeeeeezus Christ," the man grouses, turning to lay into Anne-Marie. "Never fire a goddamn gun at these things! You wanna bring the whole fuckin' swarm of them in on ya?"

Matt doesn't feel the gun drop from his suddenly nerveless fingers, but he hears it clatter on the tabletop. The noise makes McClane's head turn sharply in his direction, eyes narrowed, mouth set in a grim line. 

Then McClane's green eyes widen and he has pulled himself to his feet, and his strides are eating up the room. Matt has barely managed to launch himself up to meet him before McClane's arms are around him. His cheek presses against torn, filthy fabric and he breathes in McClane's sweat and clutches convulsively at McClane's shoulder blades and leaks all over McClane's T-shirt. 

"I take it you two know each other?" Charlie says from somewhere behind them.

Matt laughs then, and finally pulls back long enough to open his mouth – because how-what-where-howinthefuck – and that's when McClane plants the kiss on him. And whoa, okay, he'd been _wanting_ to and he was pretty sure that McClane had been wanting to but he hadn't had the guts to make his move and he figured that McClane was probably about sixty-five percent straight anyway. But apparently the Invasion of the Giant Bug-Men and the Destruction of Civilization As We Know It puts the kibosh on all of _those_ worries.

"Fuck, I hope so," Keisha says. "Never had no stranger greet _me_ like that."

 

"How?" he asks McClane later. No, he asks John. He has to call him _John_ now since they made out like a couple of teenagers under the bleachers and all. He'd be kind of embarrassed about that, except the end of the world leeches all the embarrassment out of a person. 

He doesn't have to ask about Lucy. That answer he already saw in John's eyes, when they moved out of the Rose Room and he realized John was alone.

"Thought to myself, what would Matt do?" John says. He leans back against a bookshelf, stretches his legs out in front of him. "Where would Matt go to figure this shit out?"

Matt grins. Pretty much hasn't been able to stop grinning since John's mouth left his. "And you realized that I'd go to the library to research!"

"Nah, kid," McClane -- _John_ \-- says. "I ain't that smart. I was checkin' cyber-cafes and that hole on the East Side where you play _Wizards and Warriors_."

" _Dungeons and Dragons_ ," Matt corrects absently. "Then how—"

"Well, I'm not a complete moron. After a while, I finally remembered Kaludis."

"The Warlock!" Matt says. He smacks the heel of his hand against his brow hard enough to feel it, then swipes a hand through his hair. "I didn't even… I never thought to…"

"Yeah, when he told me he hadn't heard from you I got a bit…" John shakes his head. "Let's just say that wasn't a good night. But he gave me some suggestions where you might be and libraries were one of 'em, so I been makin' the rounds hoping that…" He shrugs, those linebacker shoulders moving under the tight T. "Just hoping."

"And here I am," Matt says. He leans back to join John against the shelves – they're in Rare Books, so the glass cabinet is cool against his skin – and grins. Again.

"Here you are," John agrees. He tilts his head, the corner of his mouth upturning just a smidge. "We good, kid?"

Matt thinks again about that blistering kiss, turns his head to meet John's eyes. "So good," he says. Then he blinks. "I mean, aside from the fact that the entire world appears to have been overrun and decimated by a variety of biblically inspired giant bug-men wielding automatic weapons."

"Other than that," John says wryly.

"Exactly," Matt says. "You ever think that maybe you fell asleep and woke up in an alternate universe imagined by some fuckwad at DC Comics?"

"Was thinkin' more like James Herbert," John says. At Matt's blank look, he smiles. "Giant rats. Gave me fuckin' nightmares for weeks."

* * *

"Where do you want the seeds?" Chloe calls out.

Matt lifts a hand to shade his eyes. "Under the tarp!" he yells back. "Keep the enclosed trucks for the printed material!"

"Hey Matt, I've got Mrs. Kaludis on the horn!" Charlie shouts. Matt looks over to the see the guy leaning half out of the truck. "Wants confirmation on the meet!"

"Tabby has the co-ordinates," Matt says, searching the group bustling around the convoy. He catches Tabby's eye, nods when he sees her give him the thumbs-up and start moving toward the F-150. A rumble from an engine has him swivelling toward the front of the line. "Keish, make sure that Humvee stays out front!"

"Having fun yet?" John asks.

Matt groans. "Sure you don't wanna be the fearless leader?"

"They look to you, Matt," John says. The line of his body is warm against Matt's back even in the early summer sun, and he lets himself lean back and enjoy that heat. "You're doing fine."

Matt nods, watches as his group hustles to stow all their gear in preparation for the haul to the Midwest. Books and notes on crop production, solar panels, constructing flour mills, small engine repair, weaving fabric. A billion other things, and there's probably a billion more he forgot. But… yeah, he really is kind of doing just fine. 

If only Crain could see him now. He hopes the grumpy old headshrinker is still alive out there somewhere. 

"Pretty small group to repopulate the Earth," Matt says.

"We've got Freddie's people," John says. He feels the movement as John shrugs. "And more will join up when they see us out on the road. Aaand some of them will be dicks. That's when you'll need the muscle."

"Which right now is… you."

"Playin' to my strengths, kid," John says. "Besides, don't count out Keisha. Girl could kick my ass."

"Think that's the last of it," Marnie says, coming up to stand beside them at the shipping doors. "You want to do a final check?"

It's tempting. The library has been home for almost a month, a safe haven in the midst of all the craziness. He wouldn't mind thumbing through the books one more time; taking another look at the first editions; stopping in at the hidey-hole he and John had constructed in the South Court for a little privacy. 

But Matt reluctantly pushes away from John's comforting warmth and shakes his head. 

"Let's move," he says.

* ~ * ~ *

On the ridge formed from the collapse of one of the human's larger edifices, Qui'tlan cocks his head. The dark-haired human is barely limping when he hops into the lead vehicle.

His talon hesitates on the communication device before he lets it fall away. The convoy stirs up a dust of broken concrete as it peels away down the avenue, and he watches it go. His squadron leader wouldn't like it, but the human was kind to him once. 

His mandible is not constructed to be conducive to the endeavor, but Qui'tlan tries to smile.


End file.
